cayden mak

Blog

I struggle to have patience with the latest round of gun control debates. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, I find myself grasping for something that the promise to legislate away assault rifles simply cannot provide. Asam Ahmad lit the way for me when he wrote on Facebook that queer community, especially QTPOC community, is, in fact, a scarce and fragile thing. I’m beginning to piece it together, between the thoughts and writing of many friends, and it’s helping me crystallize my anger. A kind of anger that burns ice cold inside my bones, that feels treacherous to navigate alone. And so I’m writing this thing.

When it comes to languages, our country is a patchwork. Our civic infrastructure hasn’t kept up with more than one or two. There might be hundreds of languages spoken in our country, but they aren’t spoken by our government. Like the polyglot individual, who is fluent in many languages, government bodies and agencies need to become fluent in many languages in order to serve the people. To become a polyglot democracy, we need to design infrastructure that ensures certain patches aren’t left behind.

People from netroots activists to science fiction heavy hitters are very concerned about how big data may be infiltrating our daily lives, compromising our privacy, and creating new kinds of risks for individuals, especially at the hands of government or corporate entities. These worries are very important: as more organizing happens online, and as more communities get online, we need to make sure that security for them continues to be a core part of the web.

So everyone wants to get on Ello. It’s this new social networking site that is made to look real slick: grey on grey, monospace font, circular user profile images and big cover images for your profile page. So far, it’s clunky, awkward–a beta release, if you can call it that, but one that seems to have been pushed pretty hastily out the door. I’m all for people trying to make new things, especially in the time of Facebook supremacy. (Although I am happy to remind you that Facebook still isn’t the be-all, end-all, and we need to talk about Twitter and the ascendancy of Tumblr at some point, too.)

This summer I had the privilege of being able to spend some time with a group of Civil Rights Era veterans—folks who were Freedom Riders, organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, people who in a big way I feel like are movement elders. I was in North Carolina for Moral Monday and we had a great national convening of the collective called the Freedom Side that coincided with the march. It was amazing to feel like a part of that energy and experience this amazing historical through-line from the Civil Rights Era to the present, seeing the parallels in the moment we are in.